Artistic Nationalism and Modern Design: Lu Xun’s Book Design Project in 1920s China

In a letter to his friend written in September 1925, China’s greatest modern writer and thinker Lu Xun complained that artists today were only capable of drawing soldiers on horses dashing forward as if it could represent the so-called revolution. Seeking truly revolutionary images in Chinese art to adopt as his book cover designs, Lu Xun’s fateful encounter with the painter Tao Yuanqing initiated a five-year design collaboration that produced the most iconic and widely circulated images in 1920s China. During a period where mediums such as Chinese ink painting and Western oil-painting faced intense scrutiny regarding their ability to visualize a modernized nation, design, with its innate utility and stylistic freedom, not only evaded heavy-handed theorization, but also offered a nuanced solution to the cultural mission of creating a new kind of national art. This paper examines how their designs reconciled the tensions between artistic nationalism and modernist self-expression during a time of intense construction of a national cultural identity in a semi-colonized Republican China (1911-1949). The paper argues that the designs visualized the revolutionary spirit not through overt radicalism, but the methodical adoption and subversion of existing pictorial vocabularies in East Asian art.